Conductor and scholar Andrew Kirkman is best known as director of the small vocal group the Binchois Consort, which specializes in the music of composer Gilles Binchois and his era. He has been the director of that group for three decades. Kirkman is also a noted educator and scholar. Despite its scholarly approach, however, his music-making has a broad general appeal that has landed several Binchois Consort recordings on classical sales charts, including Scaramella (2024). Kirkman was born on December 31, 1961. He was trained at the University of Durham, King's College of the University of London, and Princeton University in the U.S.. During this period, he developed a strong interest in the music of the early Renaissance. In 1995, he gathered a group of singers to perform Guillaume Dufay's Mass for St. Anthony of Padua on the feast day of that saint. The performance went well, and the small group of six singers, plus Kirkman, were invited to record the then little-known mass for the prestigious Hyperion label. They were then asked to make a second recording, Dufay's Missa Sancti Jacobi, which earned recording-of-the-month honors from Britain's Gramophone magazine and snared the competitive Diapason d'Or award in France. Kirkman and the Binchois Consort have gone on to make more than a dozen recordings for Hyperion, mostly focusing on early Renaissance England and the Low Countries but ranging as far afield as music of the Polish Renaissance on a 2007 release. In recent years, Kirkman has steered the group toward recordings that represent the repertory of a specific historical place or situation rather than toward recordings of core repertory for its own sake. The 2019 Binchois Consort release Music for St. Katherine of Alexandria, for example, examined music devoted to that saint, who had a strong cult following in England. Kirkman and the Consort returned on Hyperion in 2021 with the album Music for the King of Scots: Inside the Pleasure Palace of James IV, and in 2024 with Scaramella: Obrecht, Fitch, Brumel, Agricola, an examination of the ramifications of a short Renaissance secular song. In the midst of this music-making activity, Kirkman is a professor at the University of Birmingham and serves as director of its Centre for Early Music Performance and Research. ~ James Manheim, Rovi